Quotes About Yoga

As a farmer ploughs a field and makes the ground soft, a yogi ploughs his nerves so they can germinate and make a better life. This practice of yoga is to remove weeds from the body so that the garden can grow. If the ground it too hard, what life can grow there? If the body is too stiff and the mind is too rigid, what life can it live?

Freedom, that is to say direct experience of samadhi, can be attained only by disciplined conduct and renunciation of sensual desires and appetites. This is brought about through adherence to the 'twin pillars' of yoga, abhyasa and vairagya. Abhyasa

In contrast to rigidity, tension is not good or bad. it has to be present at the right time in the right amount. Weighing or balancing it evenly is life. There is nothing in this world where yogis say there should be no tension at all. Even dead bodies have tension. You have to find the right amount of tension in your body. The right amount will keep all of your energy in your body. Too much tension is aggression.

begins the Yoga S?tras with atha, meaning 'now', and ends with iti, 'that is all'. Besides this search for the soul, there is nothing.

When performing asanas, no part of the body should be idle, no part should be neglected.

Many intellectually developed people are still emotionally immature. If they have to face pains, they try to escape from them. They are seldom prepared to face that pain and to work through it when they are taken intensely into a posture. This practice brings them face to face with the reality of their bodies' natures. We must face up to our emotions, not run away from them. We do not do yoga just for enjoyment; we do it for ultimate emancipation.

As we experience pleasures happily, we must also learn not to lose our happiness when pain comes. As we see good in pleasure, we should learn to see good in pain. Learn to find comfort even in discomfort. We must not try to run from the pain but to move through and beyond it. This is the cultivation of tenacity and perseverance, which is a spiritual attitude toward yoga. This is also the spiritual attitude toward life.

What Patanjali said applies to me and will apply to you. He wrote, "With this truth bearing light will begin a new life. Old unwanted impression are discarded and we are protected from the damaging effects of new experiences." (Yoga Sutras, Chapter 1, Verse 50)

Yoga is not meant to be a religion or dogmas for any one culture. While yoga sprang from the soil of India, it is meant as a universal path, a way open to all regardless of their birth and background.

Prana is special because it carries awareness. it is the vehicle of consciousness.

There is no progress toward ultimate freedom without transformation, and this is the key issue in all people's lives, whether they practice yoga or not. If we can understand how our mind and heart works, we have a chance to answer the question, "Why do I keep making the same old mistakes?

It is not just that yoga is causing all of this pain; the pain is already there. It is hidden. We just live with it or have learned not to be aware of it. It is as if your body is in a coma. When you begin yoga, the unrecognized pains come to the surface. When we are able to use out intelligence to purify our bodies, then the hidden pains are dispersed.

The challenge of yoga is to go beyond our limits - within reason.

Zoals een boer een veld ploegt en de grond zacht maakt, ploegt een yogi de zenuwen zodat ze kunnen ontkiemen en een beter leven creëren. Deze yogabeoefening is bedoeld om onkruid uit het lichaam te wieden, zodat de tuin kan groeien. Als de grond te hard is, wat kan er dan groeien? Als het lichaam te stijf is en de geest te rigide, wat voor leven heeft het dan?

Many yoga teachers ask you to do the asanas with ease and comfort and without any stress or true exertion. this ultimately leaves the practitioner living within the limits of his or her mind, with the inevitable fear, attachment, and pettiness.

As I have said, while doing yoga, the body must tell one what to do, not the brain. Brain has to cooperate with the message it receives from the body. I will often say to a student, "Your brain is not in your body! That is why you can't get the asana." I mean of course that his intelligence is in his head and not filling his body.

You watch yourself from the inside. It is a full silence. Maintain a detached attitude toward the body and, at the same time, do not neglect any part of the body or show haste but remain alert while doing the asana.

The postures are only the skin of yoga. Hidden behind them are the flesh and blood of breath control and mental techniques that are still more difficult to learn, as well as moral practices that require a lifetime of consistent application and that correspond to the skeletal structure of the body. The higher practices of concentration, meditation and unitive ecstasy(samadhi) are analogous to the circulatory and nervous system. Georg Feuerstein The Deeper Dimension of Yoga

Attitudes are enduring tendencies in your mind that show themselves in your behavior as well as your speech. Yoga encourages you to examine all your basic attitudes toward life to discover which ones are dysfunctional so that you can replace them with more appropriate ones.

This transubstantiated body is also styled ativahika-deha or "superconductive body." This omnipresent, luminous vehicle is endowed with the great paranormal powers (siddhi) acknowledged in all the scriptures of Yoga and Tantra. In the Yoga-Bîja, we find the following stanzas: The fire of Yoga gradually bakes the body composed of the seven constituents [such as bone, marrow, blood, etc.].

The true and full object and utility of Yoga can only be accomplished when the conscious Yoga in man becomes, like the subconscious Yoga in Nature, outwardly conterminous with life itself and we can once more, looking out both on the path and the achievement, say in a more perfect and luminous sense: "All life is Yoga." (Aurobindo 1976, 4)

In yoga . . . many may take one path as a key in order to experience self-realisation while others take another path, but I say that there is absolutely no difference between the various practices of yoga." —B. K. S. Iyengar, The Tree of Yoga, p. 15

Twists are wonderful for whittling your waist, stretching your back, and detoxifying the body.

Those who do surya namaskars regularly find that their batteries last longer, with less need for recharge or replenishment. Additionally, the surya namaskar aids the balance or reorganization of inner energies, in terms of right and left, or lunar and solar dimensions. This produces an innate physical and psychological equilibrium that can be an enormous asset in one's daily life. As